The Time for Incredulity Has Passed on Torture Issue

I give up. I started this blog with a
declaration of disgust over
U.S. policy that
pulled few punches, but in my list of complaints I allowed myself to say only
that the U.S. “in
the 21st Century,
still condones torture when it wants to.”

We eventually learned that condoning wasn’t the half of it. The
U.S. was not only
condoning torture, but facilitating it, committing it, contracting out for it,
diligently creating legal loopholes for it, applauding it, voting for it, and
blessing it after-the-fact.

When Abu Ghraib hit the press, I started
covering the torture policy here. I thought the revelations would be a
rare piece of data peeking through the secrecy and coverup, and I was
pleasantly surprised that the news media didn’t just pick it up and drop it
again after a one-day news cycle.

Early on in this flood,
a friend warned me that
The Picket Line was losing its focus and “was in
danger of becoming yet another blog featuring an underqualified amateur pundit
giving his unsolicited opinion on current events.” I justified my coverage of
the torture issue with two reasons: 1) that the torture policy is a good
example of just how bad the government has gotten and just how important it is
that people end their complicity with it, and 2) that the torture policy
is a stark example that I can use to make more vivid my discussions of ethics,
principle, complicity, resistance and the like.

But I miscalculated about just how much would be revealed. Little did I know
that the tip of the iceberg was going to be so huge. Now hardly a day goes by
without some new and more sickening revelation. If I covered the issue today
with as much detail as I have in the past, this blog would be nothing but news
of Americans torturing people, day in and day out. I don’t have the heart or
the endurance for that. There are other sites and other bloggers who are
better equipped and qualified to pursue this. I’m going to stick closer to my
core topic of tax resistance.

The evidence is clear and convincing that the United States has a policy,
deliberate and explicit, to engage in torture. It also has no enthusiasm for
preventing, discouraging, or punishing acts of torture that take place
parallel to but outside of this explicit framework, except when evidence leaks
so fragrantly, as in Abu Ghraib, as to be embarrassing.

Responsibility for this policy is enormously widespread, beyond the sadists
actually torturing people. The military has enthusiastically generated
whitewashed investigations; the Dubya Squad doesn’t think there’s a problem;
the Republican Congressional majority is completely in the rah-rah camp; the
Democrats can hardly be bothered to bring the subject up; the voting public
was never much concerned; the press sluggishly gnaws on bones it lets other
people dig up.

I’ve had enough of sorting through the evidence and documenting it. I know
enough already. If you don’t, I doubt anything else I say will help.

Here’s some good-news-bad-news for the war tax resistance set. One of the
stunts we like to pull during our April 15th Tax
Day protests is to have a budget simulator — usually a set of labeled slots
into which passers-by can put a number of pennies to show what their spending
priorities would be. The slots are labeled “Defense,” and “Education,” and so
forth.

Predictably, the priorities of those who attend or humor war tax resistance
demonstrations are different from the priorities of those who actually decide
how to spend our tax dollars. Most obviously, the defense budget dives down to
a level more like that of other nations, and feel-good programs to educate
kids, cure disease, and uplift the as-yet-unlifted get a big boost.

Now, the Program on International Policy Attitudes has done a more rigorous
version of the same idea — polling a random nationwide sample of 1,182
Americans about their budget priorities:

As you may know, the White House proposes a budget to Congress. In this
survey, you will make up a budget for 17 major areas of the budget. We’re not
including some big entitlement programs like Medicare or Social Security,
which by law cannot simply be adjusted year to year. For these 17 areas, a
budget of about $912 billion has been proposed for
2006. Please imagine that you have
$1,000 of your tax money to divide among these 17 areas. For each area, you’ll
see how much of your $1,000 is proposed to go to that area, and then you can
indicate how many dollars you’d like to see go to that area. You’ll be able to
monitor how much of the $1,000 you have left as you make decisions by
scrolling down to the bottom of the page.

The results?
Steep cuts to the Defense Department, to the war budget, and to the Justice
Department. Big increases in spending on such things as
UN “peacekeeping,”
job training programs, energy independence, education, medical research,
veterans’ benefits and deficit reduction.

Question #25 on the survey asked: “Imagine that the President and Congress
decided to cut defense spending by 15% and directed this money to education,
healthcare, housing, and cutting the deficit instead. Would you: Support this
decision [65% said yes], Oppose this decision [31%]…”

So why did I say this was good-news-bad-news for the liberal war tax
resistance set? The survey shows that a random sample of Americans,
Republicans and Democrats and “Others,” red state and blue state, agree that
the military budget should be cut dramatically and that money used in more
sensible ways. Sounds like an unambiguous popular affirmation of the liberal
war tax resisters’ core position.

People say this kind of stuff to pollsters all the time (and Democrats
usually rejoice at the results), but when election day comes around they
flatly don’t vote based on these priorities. If John Kerry had proposed
cutting the defense budget by $150 billion he wouldn’t have lost the election
by 3 percentage points, he would have lost by 10 or 20.

I don’t know quite why these polls always turn out this way, but I suspect
they do a lot of harm to liberals, who continue to read them as vindication
that Americans really do support liberal issues. There’s some truth to that,
but the fact is that most liberal issues aren’t salient election causes and
we haven’t succeeded in making them so. Anyone who disagrees should recommend
cutting the defense budget by 25% and reallocating the money to education and
job training. The very same people who responded to
PIPA’s poll will then cheerfully vote you
out of office in a huge landslide.

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